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“The Bitter Past” and two other mystery novels to read right now

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:17:01 GMT

“The Bitter Past,” by Bruce Borgos (Minotaur Books)“The Bitter Past,” by Bruce Borgos (Minotaur Books)As sheriff of a small Nevada town near Las Vegas, Porter Beck spends most of his time on trivial crimes — until a retired FBI agent is found tortured and murdered. Within hours, a gorgeous (of course) female FBI agent shows up and confides that the dead man had been gathering information on a KGB spy who stole secrets from a Nevada test site 60 years earlier.  It seems the Russian, who was supposedly killed in a nuclear accident, may not be dead after all, and he’s living in Beck’s jurisdiction.So Beck has to find the aging Russian before the assassin does. He’s aided not only by the glamorous FBI woman but also his sister, a crack shot, and his father, the former sheriff, who is suffering from dementia.  Beck’s suffering from his own ailment, an eye disease that makes it hard for him to see at night.“The Bitter Past” is the first in a series featuring ...

From art galleries to yoga studios, Denver’s small businesses struggling to pay rent

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:17:01 GMT

Many small business around Denver are struggling to make rent each month in an economy that, despite producing low unemployment, faces uncertainty with still-high inflation and the prospect of interest rates rising even higher.Finding a way to pay the monthly bills is forcing small-business owners to consider all options: from cutting back staff and hours of operation, to changing a business’ focus and raising prices, to moving into a smaller space, and even to making the difficult decision of closing up shop.The historic Denver neighborhood of Bonnie Brae is an example of a retail area noticeably impacted by the strain of rising rents on small businesses.The Saucy Noodle, an iconic Italian joint established in 1964 at 727 S. University Blvd., shuttered its doors for good in August 2022. At the time, co-owner Erin Markham told The Denver Post that the family business was struggling to make rent under its new landlord, Otto Petty of Endurance Real Estate Partners, and was ̶...

Airline close calls happen far more often than previously known

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:17:01 GMT

By Sydney Ember and Emily Steel, The New York TimesOn the afternoon of July 2, a Southwest Airlines pilot had to abort a landing at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. A Delta Air Lines 737 was preparing to take off on the same runway. The sudden maneuver avoided a possible collision by seconds.Nine days later, in San Francisco, an American Airlines jet was accelerating down the runway at more than 160 mph when it narrowly missed a Frontier Airlines plane whose nose had almost jutted into its path. Moments later, the same thing happened as a German airliner was taking off. In both cases, the planes came so close to hitting the Frontier aircraft that the Federal Aviation Administration, in internal records reviewed by The New York Times, described the encounters as “skin to skin.”And 2 1/2 weeks after that, an American flight to Dallas was traveling at more than 500 mph when a collision warning blared in the cockpit. An air traffic controller had mistakenly directed a ...

Fall begins when pumpkin beers arrive in August | Opinion

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:17:01 GMT

Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we offer our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems).Pumpkin beers first got popular a couple of decades ago, when some breweries, both big and small — like Coors-owned Blue Moon and Buffalo Bill’s Brewery in Hayward, Calif. — released them as a way to celebrate the fleeting flavors of the fall.One of the first (and most popular) pumpkin beers in Colorado was Venetucci Pumpkin Ale, which Bristol Brewing in Colorado Springs first made as a fundraiser in 2007 with real pumpkins from a local farm and released in October. People would line up around the block to get a few bottles back in the early and mid-2000s, and the beer is still highly sought after today.These days, there are dozens and dozens (and dozens) of Colorado pumpkin beers available at craft breweries and liquor ...

Top reasons you should try gravel biking in Colorado

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:17:01 GMT

Colorado is a playground for cyclists, with paved roads and paths, bumpy mountain trails and dirt farm, ranch and forest routes to explore. According to the nonprofit Bicycle Colorado, 73% of Coloradans own at least one bike and a whopping 41% of residents call themselves recreational cyclists. That’s a lot of pedaling going on in the Centennial State.Different types of bikes are designed to handle specific terrain — skinny, smooth-tire road bikes for pavement and knobby, fat-tire mountain bikes for off-road. But what if you want the best of both worlds, or maybe just a little bit of the best of both? This is a job best suited for the “Goldilocks” of bikes, the gravel bike.When Carol Busch, the marketing and customer communications manager for ExperiencePlus! Bicycle Tours in Fort Collins, switched from hard-core mountain biker to gravel biker three years ago, she was looking to continue “riding dirt” but her body needed a break from the jarring physicality of mountain biking....

Airbnb sues Boulder over taxation of guest “service fee”

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:17:01 GMT

Airbnb wants Boulder tax collectors to stay away from the service fee.The San Francisco-based short-term rental marketplace sued the city on Thursday, arguing that the fee — which Airbnb charges to both guests and hosts — should not have been taxed by the city in recent years.The lawsuit filed in Boulder District Court essentially asks a judge to overturn a Boulder Municipal Court ruling last month, which found that the money collected from the fee is taxable. The municipal court ordered Airbnb to pay $415,000 — with about $150,000 of that in interest and penalties — for unpaid taxes on fees collected in 2018 and 2019.A spokesperson for Boulder declined to comment.As part of a deal between Airbnb and the city reached in late 2016 — when the short-term rental industry was still nascent — Airbnb agreed to collect taxes on transactions made through its site and pass that money along to the city.Airbnb isn’t disputing that taxes are owed on the “nightly rental charge,”...

Power outage forces critical condition patients from Los Angeles hospital

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:17:01 GMT

Hundreds of patients, including some in critical condition, had to be moved when the power went out in a tower at White Memorial Hospital in Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles Monday night.The outage was reported shortly after 11 p.m. at the hospital located in the 1700 block of East Cesar E. Chavez Avenue.The Specialty Care Center was affected by the power outage, according to an alert from the Los Angeles Fire Department. Around 200 non-critical patients were moved to another building that was not impacted by the outage.Officials say 17 critical condition patients required transportation by ambulance to other hospitals and more were being prepared for transport. “At the point of the power outage their main power and emergency power was completely off, completely out,” Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Cody Weireter said. Weireter said the cause of the power outage was still under investigation. The incident seemed to be stabilizing as of 5 a.m. Tuesday but several ambu...

San Francisco Archdiocese files bankruptcy amid child sexual abuse lawsuits

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:17:01 GMT

The Archdiocese of San Francisco — which serves about 440,000 Catholics in the counties of San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo — filed for bankruptcy Monday, saying the filing is necessary to manage more than 500 lawsuits alleging child sexual abuse by church officials.The Chapter 11 protection filing will stop all legal actions against the archdiocese and thus allow it to develop a settlement plan with abuse survivors, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone said in a statement.“The unfortunate reality is that the Archdiocese has neither the financial means nor the practical ability to litigate all of these abuse claims individually, and therefore, after much consideration, concluded that the bankruptcy process was the best solution for providing fair and equitable compensation to the innocent survivors who have been harmed,” Cordileone said.The San Francisco Archdiocese is the third Bay Area diocese to file for bankruptcy after facing hundreds of lawsuits brought under a California law app...

Deebo Samuel brings a ‘little more’ speed, power, leadership to 49ers this season

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:17:01 GMT

SANTA CLARA — Watching Brock Purdy fire passes at Deebo Samuel this August looks so natural and so encouraging for the 49ers’ offense.They hooked up twice to start Saturday’s preseason win over the Broncos, and they produced seven completions in Monday’s practice.It’s not as if the Purdy-to-Samuel connection was invisible last season, while Purdy ripped off eight wins before his NFC Championship Game injury. Samuel had six catches for 133 yards and a touchdown in a playoff-opening win over Seattle.But go back to Purdy’s first start, when he outdueled Tom Brady to beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Samuel was carted off that game with knee and ankle injuries that kept him out for the next three weeks.Samuel’s offseason overhaul of his body has him primed for more targets, thanks to what he calls “a little more to my step, and a little more to my speed, so it’s a little more power.”A year ago, Purdy wasn’t exactly on Samuel’s radar, at least not u...

Kurtenbach: Kyle Harrison’s SF Giants call-up means the clock is ticking on Farhan Zaidi

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:17:01 GMT

Welcome to the show, Kyle Harrison.Now all you have to do is save the Giants’ season.Ok, ok, that might be overstating things a bit. Still, the combination of expectations surrounding the Giants’ top prospect and the desperation of a team that has lost five straight series puts the 22-year-old left-handed pitcher right into the fire when he makes his Major League debut on Tuesday in Philadelphia.No matter how it goes for the most anticipated pitcher call-up since Madison Bumgarner, the fact is that his entrance to the big leagues signals a shift for the Giants’ organization.It took much longer than expected, but welcome to Phase 2 of the Farhan Zaidi administration: the no-excuses era.The early days of Zaidi’s reign as president of baseball operations were about rebuilding a depleted farm system. He did that, and in some of the lean years since he took over — 2019, 2020, 2022 — those prospects provided hope to the Giants’ fan base.Who cares that the Gia...